


Shatter Glass

by Ladycat



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode: s03e20 First Strike, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:13:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Those hands never shook, not once in three years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shatter Glass

Glass shards crunched under everyone's feet. The control room stank of ozone and acrid, shredded metal; from the blast or the result of the blast, he couldn't differentiate. "McKay?"

"Outside." Ronon had finally been forced into receiving medical attention, but wouldn't leave despite Keller's attempts at insisting. Nobody insisted Ronon do anything. She'd given it a fair shot, though, bullying him into helping when she'd figured out he wasn't going to move. He seemed okay with that.

Both hands were stained bright red with other people's blood.

John rubbed at his face; he probably had his own dried streaks. His chin was itchy enough. "Where the hell is 'outside' right now? And why the hell is he outside? There's -- "

Ronon kept patiently wrapping the bandage around Sergeant Whitt's arm; the man would have a bruise twice the size of the injury by the time Ronon was done, but it'd bleed less. He didn't say anything when John stopped himself. Hell, he didn't even look at John -- but the message got through just the same.

Resisting the urge to sigh like an old man, John said, "Right. He went outside."

"Yeah."

"I'll just... go find him."

"Okay."

Most of the room had been cleared out, by then. The most critical patients were already down in the infirmary, a bustling beehive of frantic activity. John, like the other gawkers, had been summarily thrown out, leaving him to wander from one task to the next like he was suffering from ADD, unable to concentrate on any one thing for long. Worst was understanding he didn't need to. He was there to give the initial orders, the initial set up. After that...

Like any well-run unit, when things needed doing, the commander was often superfluous.

John was proud of that, most days. Not today, when Elizabeth lay on a white bed, stained red as she breathed shallowly. Not when the control tower felt like a hospital, the quiet sounds of people mourning and bleeding and hurting pushed to a distant, hushed remove. Not now, when he needed to do something and he couldn't do a god damned thing.

"It's creepy," Rodney said the moment John was close enough to hear. "I never would've thought that before. After all, the city is _designed_ to fly and this isn't the first time I've been in space. It's never bothered me before, even though space can be incredibly claustrophobic." Any other moment, and that phrase would've been said with pride. "Now. Now it just." His voice broke.

He was leaning against the balcony railing, shoulders bunched and pushed back, tight with strain, head hanging while he leaned his weight onto his fists. They shook. Those hands _never_ shook, not once in three years.

The vastness of space actually made a nice backdrop, like the star-touched velvet was something a painter had conjured up. _Physicist at Rest_ , maybe. Or _Imminent Breakdown._

"You can't be claustrophobic in space. That's agoraphobia."

"Go away. I can't pull miracles out of _nothing_ if you're here bothering me."

"Am I bothering you?" The air felt dead and stale as John moved closer. A cough tickled the back of his throat, but he ignored it; that was just sense-memory, craving a breeze that smelled like salt and verbena the whole year round. The railing was cold against his hip even through his pants. Not quite the frigid ice of deep space, but close.

"Oh, is this, is this your way of making me work _faster?_ " Twisting, Rodney lifted blood-shot eyes framed by a still-bloody, cut up face and glared at John. "Are you going to start counting down to when we run out of air and all _suffocate_ to death because McKay can't rewrite the laws of physics and pull rabbits out where the Ancients only got bloody carcasses? Because _I don't know what's wrong._ Zelenka doesn't know what wrong. _Nobody_ knows what's wrong, and until we know what's wrong, we don't know how to fix it, _I_ don't know how to fix it and we're all going to die, oh god. Oh, god, I'm going to kill everyone."

"Pretty sure it's the Replicators fault we're gonna die." Another half-step and John got his shoulder snuggly against Rodney's. Blood trickled from Rodney's skin to John's, but he ignored it. The blood wasn't the problem. "That, and the Ancient's for not leaving ZPM instruction manuals lying around."

"Oh, ha ha, Colonel."

But Rodney didn't sound quite as frantic as a few minutes earlier, and John counted that as a win. Rodney worked well under pressure, but everybody had a breaking point. "See? Made you laugh."

Rodney retaliated with such a black, bitter expression that John found he was laughing, reluctantly pulling Rodney into half-heartedly chuckling with him. It wasn't funny. Nothing was funny. But it was either laugh or crumble, and Rodney couldn't crumple. He was their best shot. 

He was always their best shot.

"How's Elizabeth?" Rodney was calmer, but his voice still carried that frenzied, frantic note from his transmission a painful half hour before. The one that John was sure he'd hear in his dreams -- if he survived to have dreams, anyway.

"Keller says she'll tell us when she knows." That answer sucked every time John had ever heard it. It never deviated, either: doctors talked when they were good and ready, not before.

Rodney took a deep breath. "I don't know how to fix this." The way he said it, it sounded like _space is really dark._ "And I really need to bone up on my gallows humor. If we survive this, how about a Buffy marathon? They could quip in the face of anything."

Despite three years surrounded by people who regularly quoted that particular program, John had never seen it. Who needed to relive high school? "Sure. I'll bring popcorn."

"We ran out of popcorn three weeks ago."

John bumped his shoulder, gently; he wasn't sure how extensive Rodney's injuries were. "I have a secret stash," he whispered. He knew whispering made him look ridiculous. Since that was the point, he didn't mind.

"Oh." Rodney kept his eyes focused forward, but they were unfocused and distant. He wasn't looking at anything. "Would you -- no, of course you have things you need to be doing."

It always startled John each time how childlike Rodney could be, when he was like this. When it was this bad. Normally Rodney was so angry, a virtuoso diva playing to his audience, that it was almost painful as John realized how much just having another person there -- bickering, sharing, taking even a tiny corner of the burden -- helped. "Hang on."

A quick check with Ortiz, next highest in rank after Lorne, told him what he'd thought: things were okay. Not great, and the tense tone in Ortiz's voice meant he had maybe another ten minutes of quiet.

But ten minutes was a lot, when they only had a couple hours. Ten minutes was a lifetime.

"Show me what you've got," he ordered, using his weight to push Rodney into a more upright position. "C'mon, McKay. Tick, tock!"

"My hate for you knows _no_ bounds," Rodney snapped, but there was a smile lurking above the scowl. He stomped back over to the console, hands already pulling of streams of multi-colored data, splashed over the screens like abstract mosaics.

John reached up and wiped away a trickle of blood before it reached Rodney's eye. It was hot and slick on his skin. Rodney didn't flinch at the touch, barely even seemed to notice it. John still tucked his thumb against his palm, then held that hand entirely behind his back, saying, "So, we've ruled out a virus, right?"

"Yes, because I'm an absolute moron," Rodney snapped, ratcheting up to whirl-wind levels like he'd never drooped at all. "Of course we looked for a virus, would you like to comb through our scans?"

John smiled as guileless as possible. "I trust you, Rodney." Behind his back, he rubbed Rodney's blood into his palm, keeping it warm.


End file.
